Marvel Ultimate Alliance review (Wii)

Comic book games are exceptionally difficult to get right. Not to say they can't be done well, as the last 5 years have seen them more consistently better than videogaming has seen in a long time. But there's still the problem of getting it totally right, through pleasing the main target audience of often picky comic book fans (of which I'm proudly one of, given I heavily read and write them) while getting a damn good game out of it. Tricky. Gaming is such an active medium compared to the passively read comic (or indeed most other mediums) that gameplay is all. But if you don’t stick true to the source material, then what's the point in the first place? It's enough to give Dr. Bruce Banner a green tinged headache.

Thankfully, Vicarious Visions and Activision have come up with a solution to that problem. Although it has to be said, while that one problem is solved another Wii related one slowly rears it head…

A Marvellous party of its own making

But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. After all, it's worth noting above all else that Marvel Ultimate Alliance is a good game. Not great but certainly good. The reason being Vicarious Visions has used its experience from creating predecessor series, X-Men Legends, to great effect.

The roots are that of an action role-playing game, similar to something like Baulder's Gate; you have a team of heroes given objectives and you crash and bash your way around 3D levels taking out enemies, collecting items and solving rudimentary puzzles. So nothing too new there. The base gameplay is slightly evolved and polished - hardly revolutionary, but that wasn’t the intention in the first place.

Your party consists of four members at a time, but there's over twenty characters to eventually select from, offering a pleasant and wide array of heroes (and anti heroes) that have rarely been given videogame screen time before.

Fans will be happy to see Moon Knight, Deadpool and Doctor Strange join the more familiar faces of Wolverine, Spider-Man, Captain America and many others, each with a wide variety of moves and abilities to make for some interesting team-ups.

The smart part comes from the developers' mix and match policy. Rather than strip the characters from certain eras and storylines, Vicarious has kept its continuity loose and free, taking costumes and attitudes from both the regular Marvel universe and the Ultimate (read: revamped for newer audiences) universe and combining them to create a timeline and set of rules/characters unique unto themselves. A prudent move that lets the dev team break free of sticky and pedantic comic-to-game translation concerns and allows for greater freedom for the design on a whole.

Villainous issues

As a result, Marvel Ultimate Alliance manages to bypass that previously noted problem of keeping both groups (comic book readers and gamers) happy, with a perfect marriage of licence freedom and tried and tested gameplay.

Neither aspect is totally perfect in its own right -as there are occasional moments where the script and voice acting are atrocious and the gameplay can become quite tiresome and undefined- but we'll get to that in a second. The main thing to note though is that a competent job has been made to make sure these two important facets work well together rather than an awkward shoehorned mess.

But as aforementioned, the gameplay does have its fair share of problems. As a hack and slash style of progression, things can get monotonous quickly, with the game rather ill-paced early on. The gift of having so many powers and abilities for your heroes is slightly watered down by the fact the visuals aren’t always clear and a little too zoomed out at times, making battles a mad mash of colours and spotty animation.

Without the clear definition of what's going on, Ultimate Alliance can sometimes degenerate into an unfocused array of confusion. It's great that so many characters and skills are at your finger tips, but when it's so hard to see what you're actually doing with them on occasion it pairs the gameplay down into something more generic.

Not always helping is the slightly dim friend AI, which will sometimes require you to make use of the commands for them to be effective. Far too many times will they give up attacking an enemy to focus on the solitary man you're battling, leaving their previous rejected target to pick you off as you all gang slam one bad guy. And on a design tip, the inventory screens are a tad clunky and unfriendly as well, with it far too easy to make mistakes that can't be rectified, which could be off putting for beginners.

Wii - Ultimately its own worst enemy

Of course above all else you'll want to know how Ultimate Alliance translates to Wii. Which is where things a decidedly split. To be frank, some of it works but most of it doesn’t. You're given a set number of calibration moves before you start to test for motion accuracy then you can perform them in-game.

In theory this is fine, but in practice it's far too clunky. Using gestures for attacks comes off as inaccurate in the heat of the moment, and given the already mentioned lack of definition regarding some of the visuals, it can become frustrating and clumsy. With many of the moves more easily done via button presses, it may not take long before you're back to more traditional methods.

It's not all bad news, though. Ultimate Alliance uses the nunchuk's motion sensing abilities to control the camera (while the analogue stick controls your character's movement), and it's surprisingly well done.

The sensitivity is just about right and spinning the camera around with a mere tilt not only frees up some buttons but it's quite intuitive as well. So while the gamble didn’t pay off altogether, the implementation of Wii controls has yielded some improvements to the game in one aspect.

It feels a little bit of a shame, as the ideas behind the patchy execution are sound. It certainly comes into its own with several friends, thanks to a versatile combat combo engine that can see you throw enemies into your pals' attacks and then bounce them off the scenery for extra damage (all laced with a suitably dramatic and booming soundtrack). Lovely. Just a pity that some of that will be done accidentally via some haphazard waggling that will likely have you saying: "I didn’t mean to do that", followed by "actually, I'm not even sure what I did anyway".

An Alliance for the future

On the whole, Marvel Ultimate Alliance is an enjoyable if brainless dungeon crawler that acts as the (suitably) ultimate Marvel fan-service via its wide range of characters, trivia, Easter eggs and bonuses. At the same time, for every good thing there's an irritation that couples it. Its good voice acting is balanced by hammy voice acting. The decent and nicely varied visuals are limited by poor detail and slightly ill-defined models. The brilliant use of powers and moves are hampered by the inability to see them properly at times. And the brilliant Wii-unique camera control is coupled with the not so brilliant motion activated gestures.

If you're a fan of the franchise and new to Wii it shouldn’t be enough to put you off. There's more than enough here to keep you going and entertain, and the comic fanboy inside of me loved the massive array of touches included for geeking out. The fairly patchy Wii functionality isn't enough to critically damage Marvel Ultimate Alliance but it's certainly something many developers will have to work on. It should make the inevitable sequel something to look forward to.